


don't you see me?

by Nialler



Series: infidelity [1]
Category: One Direction (Band)
Genre: Age Difference, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Emotional Infidelity, Emotional Manipulation, F/M, Infidelity, Lawyer Harry, girl!Niall, midwestern USA AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-13
Updated: 2018-10-10
Packaged: 2018-11-13 14:49:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death, No Archive Warnings Apply, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,849
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11187378
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nialler/pseuds/Nialler
Summary: “This is weird, isn’t it?”Harry’s drunk, the way he usually is when Niall’s phone lights up after midnight with a familiar inquiry as to her plans that night. The good news is that he’s a functioning drunk; they’ve thrown four beer cans out the window in the drive here and Niall doesn’t have the nerve to ask how many he had before she showed up, but his driving remains steady.





	1. now, here you go again

Niall needs a cigarette. 

It’s one of those things that she tries to limit, tries to wait until she’s at her lowest point before pulling the pack out of her purse and lighting one, halfway hanging out her car window as to not tint the windows with smoke like her dad did in her childhood. She could drive to the nearest 24-hour mini mart right now and buy a pack and smoke the whole thing tonight if she was alone. She smoked half a pack that night she drove home with a lump in her throat after Harry fell asleep.

She’s not alone now though. Niall’s perched anxiously in a familiar luxury car, parked out in the middle of nowhere on a dirt road. It’s past two in the morning and it must be windy the way the trees sway up ahead in a break between farm property. Niall hasn’t spoken in a few minutes, curled up in the passenger seat with her head and shoulder against the cool window.

“This is weird, isn’t it?”

Harry’s drunk, the way he usually is when Niall’s phone lights up after midnight with a familiar inquiry as to her plans that night. The good news is that he’s a functioning drunk; they’ve thrown four beer cans out the window in the drive here and Niall doesn’t have the nerve to ask how many he had before she showed up, but his driving remains steady.

Niall feels a secret thrill at the thought of getting pulled over, having Scott from the local PD shine a flashlight into Harry’s window on suspicion of drunk driving and finding Niall in his passenger seat. Word would get around town fast -- local lawyer Harry Styles having an affair with blonde harlot Niall Horan, did you hear about that?

She pushes the thought away though.

Niall sits up in the seat, rubbing her eyes with the back of her hand blearily before casting her gaze over to him. “No, it’s not weird.”

It should be weird, really. Niall remembers back when Harry was literally twice her age, an ambitious twenty-eight year old who moved into farmtown USA as a bit of rural peace from his job in the city. Niall was a scrawny fourteen year old thing at the time, still brunette and brace faced the first time she caught glimpse of him. Up until that point, boys were just friends that she roamed around town with after school. 

She hurried inside, embarrassed by the flush in her cheeks upon seeing Harry move in a few blocks down from her one summer when her and Liam were bicycling around town. Liam, as sensitive as ever, spent the rest of the week thinking Niall was upset with him.

Harry extends a long arm, Niall’s eyes trained on the tattoo pressed into the crook of his elbow. She only saw him in long sleeves and suit jackets until she turned sixteen and Harry’s wife trusted Niall enough to watch their one year old daughter, Olivia. That first time she knocked on his door and Harry answered in a t-shirt with the sides cut out and a pair of basketball shorts, Niall thought she would die right there.

“I’m eighteen,” Niall says for the umpteenth time since they’ve started this, right as Harry’s hand brushes across her bare shoulder. She was already in bed when Harry texted this time, wearing a tank top and athletic shorts, and didn’t bother changing as she stumbled for her keys and flip flops.

Harry smiles, rubbing the pad of his thumb over the corner of his mouth. Niall’s skin feels electric. She had a beer, and at her prime (if sixteen years old could be considered a prime) she could drink a pack and remain standing at a party, but now two years later she’s buzzing with the urge to kiss the way she always does when she’s had a little. A lightweight.

“And I’m thirty-three,” Harry reminds her, like he always does, part of him still attached to his moral compass. Niall turns nineteen in the fall and starts local college, and Harry’s son will turn two. She’s been trusted to watch Lucas since birth though.

Harry’s hand betrays his words though, moving from Niall’s shoulder to the expanse of her bare back between her tank top straps, rubbing his fingers into the skin on either side of her spine gently.

Niall decompresses, a sigh escaping.

The worst part, really, is how long she waited for this. How long she had ogled at Harry from afar until he invited her to babysit Olivia, how long she had admired the flex of Harry’s bicep as he cradled a newborn Lucas and showed Niall the easiest way to give him a bottle. Her feelings had been four years in the making when Harry had simply came home and kissed her.

Niall had been watching Lucas all day while Harry was at a company golf outing, Olivia and Charlotte gone for a long weekend with Harry’s in-laws. Harry was supposed to be home around six but Niall didn’t hear the garage door open until after eight, half asleep on the couch. Lucas was already tucked in bed with a bottle.

Harry had come in through the garage door, sunburn evident by the flush of his face. It was barely the middle of May but it was going to be hot this summer. Niall’s last day of high school was the previous Friday. “I’m sorry,” Harry started, as Niall stood up from the couch. His eyes were glassy and Niall knew better than to stay long. 

Sometimes Harry would invite her to stay for dinner and a movie when Char wasn’t home. Niall was always pleased but not pleased enough as Harry sat in his chair across the room, both kids curled up in his lap as Niall sat on the couch.

“It’s okay, really,” Niall had told him, pulling her dress down around her thighs.

She watched as Harry toed his shoes off, ran a hand through his wind blown hair, and smiled at her from the kitchen. “You ever seen Memento?”  
Harry had a thing for Christopher Nolan. Niall had shook her head no. They watched Inception last time, but he was sober then.

“Sit,” Harry said after a pause, teeth worrying at his bottom lip. “Let me change and then we can watch it.”  
He ended up sitting down right next to Niall on the couch once the movie started, in a pair of sweats and a ratty t-shirt. In a way that Niall still isn’t sure how one event transitioned to another, but every touch making her spine feel like a live wire, Harry drew her in.

She thought he tasted like rum.

Now, though, Harry sighs next to Niall, legs splayed in his Beamer. They’d had sex twice that weekend and hadn’t touched since. Harry was drunk both times and Niall was tipsy the second time. She’d babysat a few times since then, but Harry had kept his distance.

“Not weird, I promise,” Niall reiterates, turning herself sideways in the seat to smile at Harry. He’s been full of long touches all night and she doesn’t hesitate as she leans in a brushes a hand across his stubbly chin, his hand still working at her back.

Harry surges forward.


	2. the way you've forgotten my name

In Niall’s mind, everything is divided into three fragments of time. There is the before, the after, and the moment that everything burned into her mind like a single polaroid that was spit out and left at her feet to develop. If she was able to feel her hands on that wet county road when that picture started to clear up, she would have taken a marker and captioned it Liam.

He had kissed her after a week of silence when Harry moved into the neighborhood. Even with a year and several inches of height between them, they had always been attached at the hip growing up. “I think I’m in love with you, truly,” He announced on her doorstep one day when Bobby was at work, holding a bouquet of limp flowers with white knuckles.

“You think?” Niall pushed the screen door ajar and smiled until he bent down to press his lips against her teeth. She kissed a boy once before but not like this, where there was a free hand on her cheek and a surprising tongue against her bottom lip after a moment.

Niall had forgotten the thought of a man twice her age and remembered the way she liked to glance at Liam’s sinewy biceps, just there enough to be prominent on his own teenage body. She had thought it was natural, but then Liam’s mouth was on her neck as they stumbled into the kitchen blindly and she realized that she coveted that boy for a long time.

The accident happened a week before their two year anniversary.

Niall would be seventeen in the fall, but at the time it was summer and Liam’s truck was still in the shop for one thing or another, and they wanted to go to the movies in the next town over. It was like that, living in the midwest, a place where every attraction at your fingertips would be over thirty minutes away -- so you spent days scrambling back from close towns to by groceries and go out to eat. It had rained all day but was only misting as Niall drove them in her hand me down car from Greg, an old Pontiac that got the shittiest gas mileage.

She still can’t recall every moment. She doesn’t try either.

The corn was just high enough to be a burden as she paused at the four-way intersection, creeping out just enough to peek around the crops to make sure there was no car coming. Niall put her foot on the gas.

She doesn’t know if she even made a noise as the car coming towards her on her right barreled right into Liam’s door. One minute she was driving and the next her car was sideways some yards away in the corn field, and everything was fuzzy. Niall crawled out of her busted window and felt nothing. At the ER later, they stitched her up while she stared blankly at the wall, pulling fragments of glass out of her scalp and thighs. But it was the moment -- everything was Liam.

He wasn’t moving when she pulled him out of the passenger door, and she knew just enough to check his pulse before starting CPR. She had lifeguarded for a month and thought she was tough stuff for saving a little girl from drowning last week, now she felt small as she counted aloud to thirty, before tilting Liam’s head back for rescue breaths.

She couldn’t hear anything, couldn’t taste or feel but she could see Liam’s face clearly. He was stubbly and beautiful, even with a leaking gash across his temple. She wouldn’t stop, couldn’t stop even as she felt his sternum crack under her palms on a strong compression.

She was told later that she screamed like a banshee as the paramedics dragged her from Liam’s body onto the stretcher. She didn’t speak for three days as she laid in the hospital bed and cried, always wetting her stitches at her hairline as the tears flowed. It was the last time she felt close to Bobby, as he pulled up a chair and held her over the bed railing while she cried into his arms, and every time the tide would ebb out and allow her to stop, Liam’s face came back behind her eyelids.

Niall learned later that she had done CPR for fifteen minutes, and the eighty-year old man that hit her called 911 and stood at his damaged car while she tried to revive Liam. The man was supposed to wear glasses at night. He wasn’t.

Liam had died on impact.

\--

Niall’s right arm turned out to be absolutely fragmented, so Karen zipped up her black dress on the Monday they buried Liam. Niall’s cast was blue and she wouldn’t let anyone sign it, barely even wanted anyone to look at her. Geoff was the first person she spoke to after her length of silence and even then all she could manage were wet apologies into his shirt. She wanted to die, she wished she would have.

The service occurred, Niall could tell you that much. She stood there dutifully as Liam’s pastor spoke, eyes narrowed in on the school picture of Liam they had used beside the casket. She had placed her favorite picture of her and Liam on the lake in his hands before they closed the lid, and stopped crying until she could be alone later. She wanted to crawl into that hole where Liam was and let them cover her with dirt, let her lungs fill with soil before they stopped moving. She couldn’t take it.

The after was even worse than that polaroid picture she kept in her mind.

Niall never enjoyed Andy, but Liam loved him so Niall accepted his invitation to come over to a small gathering in his basement. Niall drank quite a bit when Liam was alive, the Bobby in her, but Liam would always be formidable at her side when another guy glanced at her. Liam was always sweet until it came to protecting Niall.

But when a bottle of wine was passed around the party, and then another, there was no one to protect Niall as Andy placed his hand under her black dress, moments after she was retching into the toilet in his dim basement bathroom. “No, no Andy, no,” Niall tried, but was loose limbed and too hurt from the accident still to fight him off.

No one else at the party must have gave thought to the sound of Niall crying from the bathroom, and when word got out that Niall was greedy for Andy’s cock the day of Liam’s burial, no one had the mind to piece it together.

Apparently death and rape created an instant Pariah.

\--

Harry comes home one afternoon that Niall is sitting with the kids, braiding Olivia’s hair as Lucas trains his little eyes on the cartoon Batman on the screen, when they’re two months into the completely unspoken affair. Niall’s smart enough to figure it out, that it means nothing to him, but she still comes over after dark on the nights Char is gone and the kids are tucked in bed. She gasps into Harry’s palm on the first thrust every time.

“Hi, pretty girls,” Harry coos as he drops his suit jacket on the back of the couch, and Niall blushes slightly as she turns her head to face him. Lucas breaks away from the televised action to run right into Harry’s thighs with a hug. The baby will be two in October and the thought hurts Niall’s heart, even if he isn’t her child.

She wonders if she’s too busy playing step-mommy to see the bigger picture.

Niall wraps an elastic around Olivia’s finished braid so she could go hug her dad too, and Niall is in the kitchen toeing on her sandals when Harry puts his hand on her shoulder.

“Going so soon?”

She blinks. “Char will be home at five?”

Harry shakes his head. “Stay for dinner, she’s working a double.”

\--

Later, the kids are in bed as Harry plows into her from behind and Niall almost wants to cry into the pillow she’s got her face buried in when his voice is a low growl behind her, “You’re so perfect Niall, want you forever, all mine.”

Niall assumes it’s just dirty talk, doesn’t think anything of it, until Harry comes out of the shower a little after two, a towel wrapped around his waist and his dark curls slicked back wetly. “How would you feel about going on a trip?”

Niall sits up in bed where she’s been watching the news and listening to the baby monitor in case Lucas cries. She’s still naked and doesn’t feel self conscious as the blankets slip down her chest. She likes the way Harry looks at her. “Like, to the zoo?”

Harry looks at her questioningly. “You like the zoo?”

“No, not really. Thought you meant…for the kids.”

“A trip for us. So we don’t have to sneak. I’ll tell Char its business related and we can fly out.”

Niall’s heart thuds. Oh. This is no longer undiscussed. It’s just an affair, and she’s still the bad person involved. She doesn’t feel bad as she smiles though, “Fly out?”

Char will be home soon and Niall better put on her clothes, but Harry doesn’t seem to think that as he drops his towel and pulls the blanket back from Niall. She doesn’t notice he’s hard until he spits into his hand and rubs it over his cock.

“How would you like Orlando?” He asks, and then thrusts in the full length.

Niall thinks, stupidly, that she’s found a feeling she discarded long ago.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> just reformatting this into one cohesive work, as I will be updating this universe soon :-)


End file.
